A&J Fabtech Water division celebrates £10million milestone

Having spent over 20 years designing, constructing and installing structures for water treatment, A&J Fabtech Water Division is celebrating hitting the £10million order mark since the start of its own current 5 year investment and business development plan which started in 2014.

Mark Wright, Managing Director at A&J comments, “the water division came into being back in 1994 in order to formalise the supply of bridge scrapers, skimmers, thickeners and associated platforms, gantries and access structures to the UK water authorities. This was also when our first 5-year plan came into being. Over the years we have refined our electro-mechanical designs and continued to improve the performance and reliability of the products. In-fact there are very few major water treatment facilities in the UK that don’t include some of our equipment.

We set our own planning, investment and targets in a five year cycle, as does the Water industry itself with the five-yearly Asset Management Plan (AMP) periods. We start ours before the AMP period ends and extend it through the main investment period during the middle of the following AMP cycle. Prices for the water industry are obviously set by Ofwat at the beginning of each period, following submissions from each company about what it will cost to deliver their business plans, so we base the first years on known quantities.

It’s our job to make sure our planning falls in-line with this industry cycle, and hitting the £10million order intake mark this early in a cycle is a major achievement, especially as the bulk of the investment in the current AMP6 period is still yet to come. We can see that most of the UK water authorities are going to have to spend quickly now to keep-up with the targets set them for investment in infrastructure projects.

One of the reasons we retain our own design team and a large fabrication facility is to balance our work between, power, rail, water and general fabrication – this allows us to retain the capacity needed for when the peaks arrive in cyclic industry specific investment periods. There is investment to come from the UK water industry and we will be ready for it.”